There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Eugene Debs, leader of the Pullman Strike of 1894 and one of America’s best-loved labor leaders. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free,” he said. (i1.19)

  “King Debs” caricatured at the height of the Pullman Strike as a petulant man-child thwarting the nation’s railways and commerce. (i1.20)

  In July 1892 steelworkers and their families at Homestead, Pennsylvania, stunned America with a brutal, sustained assault against the three hundred Pinkerton agents sent by Carnegie Steel. (i1.21)

  After the workers’ violent rejection of the company’s hired Pinkertons, Pennsylvania state militia march into Homestead to restore order. (i1.22)

  “Study your union card, Sam,” a mentor advised cigar maker Samuel Gompers, later the head of the American Federation of Labor, “and if the idea does not square with that, it ain’t true.” (i1.23)

  Gompers began work as a boy in an urban cigar-making factory similar to the one pictured here. (i1.24)

  “The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist,” mused anarchist Alexander Berkman, as he headed toward his confrontation with Carnegie Steel’s authoritarian Henry Clay Frick. (i1.25)

  “The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist,” mused anarchist Alexander Berkman, as he headed toward his confrontation with Carnegie Steel’s authoritarian Henry Clay Frick. (i1.26)

  Striking New York City messenger boys posed on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-second Street in 1900. (i1.27)

  The irrepressible Emma Goldman—intellectual, writer, and revolutionary. (i1.28)

  Coxey’s Army, the so-called “petition in boots” led by the visionary reformer Jacob S. Coxey, en route from Ohio to Washington in 1894. (i1.29)

  Industrialist George M. Pullman, workers’ antagonist in the Pullman Strike of 1894. (i1.30)

  “By God, if I decide that these men are innocent I will pardon them if I never hold office for another day,” stated Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893, reconsidering the verdicts of the three living defendants in the controversial Haymarket trial. (i1.31)

  “I despise the law and I am not a law-abiding citizen,” warned Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, which formed in 1905. “We are the Revolution!” Having lost his right eye in a childhood accident, he made it a practice always to turn his left profile to the camera. (i1.32)

  “I don’t want to be an actress,” proclaimed youthful soapboxer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. “I’m in the labor movement and I speak my own piece.” (i1.33)

  Attorney Clarence Darrow, defending Bill Haywood and two others in the 1907 Steunenberg murder trial, assured the jury, “Don’t be so blind in your madness as to believe that if you make three fresh, new graves you will kill the labor movement of the world.” (i1.34)

  “I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops,” noted a reporter of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. “These dead bodies were their answer.” (i2.1)

  Spirited New York City garment workers gather at a May Day celebration. (i2.2)

  Seamstresses of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) picket in support of the huge 1910 walkout. (i2.3)

  Mother Jones with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. “My address is like my shoes. It travels with me,” Jones replied when Congress asked where she lived. “I abide where there is a fight against wrong.” (i2.4)

  (Left to right) Joseph Caruso, Joseph Ettor, and Arturo Giovannitti, IWW defendants and leaders of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, shackled together at their trial for the alleged murder of mill worker Anna LoPizzo. (i2.5)

  In the strike of 1912, textile workers and Massachusetts state militia faced off almost daily in front of the Lawrence mills. (i2.6)

  Before Lawrence police halted the exodus, children of the town’s striking mill workers prepare to depart for temporary shelter in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The IWW effort was meant to aid stricken workers’ families, but also proved effective publicity for the Lawrence strike. (i2.7)

  “We gesticulated, we paced the platform, we appealed to the emotions,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn said of the Wobblies’ style of orating. Here she addresses striking Paterson silk workers in 1913. (i2.8)

  A group of IWW supporters is joined by Big Bill Haywood (center) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (far right). (i2.9)

  The winter of 1914 brought hardship to southeastern Colorado’s striking coal miners, who sought refuge with their families in union tent colonies. An assault on one workers’ enclave by militia resulted in the notorious Ludlow Massacre, and stirred nationwide outrage at the rigid anti-union policies of coal baron John D. Rockefeller Jr. (i2.10)

  The defiant IWW songwriter Joe Hill went before a Utah prison firing squad in 1915 for a murder he probably didn’t commit. “Don’t waste any time in mourning,” he wrote Big Bill Haywood. “Organize!” (i2.11)

  Veteran western activist Frank Little, “half Indian, half white man, all IWW,” enraged authorities and patriots’ groups from California to Montana, and earned the limp and scars to show for it. (i2.12)

  The desperate need for activism to win the freedom of Wobblies held in the Cook County jail at the time of the 1918 IWW Espionage Act trial inspired this sticker by one of the imprisoned men, poet and artist Ralph Chaplin. (i2.13)

  “We will not compromise with rattlesnakes,” the Bisbee, Arizona, copper magnates said of the IWW in the early summer of 1917. On July 12, at the order of Sheriff Harry Wheeler, vigilantes herded more than a thousand striking miners and other “undesirables” into cattle cars for deportation to New Mexico. (i2.14)

  At the urging of Congress and the press, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer targeted suspected Bolshevik sympathizers and labor radicals across the country, an effort that became personal after his own Washington home was bombed by anarchists. (i2.15)

  The young J. Edgar Hoover was the Justice Department’s leading expert on U.S.-based radicals, keeping tabs on no fewer than sixty thousand suspects. (i2.16)

  A “radical” office searched and demolished by raiding federal agents—a not unusual scene during the era of the Palmer and Lusk Committee raids. (i2.17)

  “The most pugnaciously hell-raising male rebel I could find in the United States,” was how Max Eastman of The Masses described Carlo Tresca, who played a prominent role in IWW-led strikes in Lawrence, New York, and Paterson in 1912–1913. Fortunately, Tresca often spoke to striking workers in Italian, leaving police spies unsure exactly what he had said. (i2.18)

  A poster created by documentarian Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, a reform group that advocated for a federal child labor law in the early years of the twentieth century. (i2.19)

  Coal mine “breaker boys,” appearing here in a Hine photograph from Pennsylvania, sifted rocks and debris from the coal as it arrived at the mine’s surface. Most were adolescents, but some began work as young as age seven. (i2.20)

  “C.I.O.! C.I.O.! C.I.O.!” chanted strikers as they marched to a Republic Steel facility in Chicago on Memorial Day, 1937. Authorities attempted to blame demonstrators for the ensuing violence, which left ten dead, but news photos revealed the police were at fault. (i2.21)

  Mild and unassuming in manner and appearance, the successful West Coast dockworkers’ organizer Harry Bridges, here attending a 1937 meeting in Washington, gained the trust and admiration of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. (i2.22)

  The “stormy petrel of American labor,” United Mine Workers chief John L. Lewis (left), confers with fellow Washington labor insider Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. (i2.23)

  Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member in U.S. history, knew President Franklin D. Roosevelt well from his early political career
in the New York legislature, when she had been a factory safety reformer; during the New Deal she was one of his closest advisers on labor and social welfare issues. (i2.24)

  In the notorious Battle of the Overpass, UAW official Richard Frankensteen is attacked by members of the Ford Motor Company’s “Service Department” outside the River Rouge plant on May 26, 1937. (i2.25)

  Walter Reuther comforting a bloodied Frankensteen after the assault. (i2.26)

  In the protracted Flint sit-down strike of 1937, workers successfully held the General Motors facilities against court injunctions, a police assault, and the threat of militia. The strike set in motion the process that would ultimately unionize the U.S. auto industry. (i2.27)

  Autoworkers making creative use of the workplace to wait out strike developments. (i2.28)

  The 1941 UAW-CIO strike against the Ford Motor Company finally succeeded in organizing America’s last non-union automaker. (i2.29)

  Stoop labor in a cotton field photographed by the Farm Security Administration’s Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression. (i2.30)

  An organizer addresses a night rally for striking California cannery workers in 1938. (i2.31)

  Jimmy Hoffa’s appearance on the cover of Life signaled his emergence as a troubling and divisive national figure. Tough workers’ advocate to some, most Americans perceived in him the ugly influence of corruption on the country’s union movement. (i2.32)

  Martin Luther King Jr., recognizing that the struggle for equal rights was meaningless if not joined with a crusade for workers’ rights and economic justice, lent his support to the plight of low-paid Memphis sanitation workers in the spring of 1968. (i2.33)

  “The picket line is a beautiful thing,” observed César Chávez, leader of the United Farm Workers, “because it does something to a human being.” (i2.34)

  United Farm Workers and their supporters protest the sale of Gallo wines on Long Island during the nationwide UFW grape boycott of the 1970s. (i2.35)

  “Dammit, the law is the law, and the law says they cannot strike. If they strike, they quit their jobs,” President Ronald Reagan warned the air traffic controllers union in 1981. PATCO’s decimation, and the administration’s quick hiring of replacement workers, came to epitomize the loss of organized labor’s stature in the 1980s. (i2.36)